I have a lot of big ideas about the reality collapse. I haven’t written it all in one place, but I’ve been writing bits about it for years now. Many news stories are beginning to pop up showing what I’ve been saying is indeed happening.
Basically, the deal is, humans allowed technology to become reality. The first thing was the telephone – talking to someone far away without being able to see them. Then TVs showed global events which you did not personally witness. Then the internet.
Now, all of those technologies that we’ve allowed to serve as stand-ins for physical reality are being increasingly manipulated, to the point where we cannot tell what is real anymore. This is going to continue to get worse and worse.
A California senior citizen was swindled out of $25,000 by scammers using an AI voice mimicking his son to make him believe his loved one was involved in a “horrible accident” and needed money to be bailed out of jail.The man, identified only as Anthony, said he received a call from who he believed to be his son, saying he had struck a pregnant woman while driving, and she was “rushed to the ICU,” according to ABC 7.
“It was his voice. It was absolutely his voice,” he told the outlet. “There was no doubt about it.”
Los Angeles Police Department detective Chelsea Saeger told ABC 7 that scammers have become “more clever and sophisticated” over recent years.“They are using social media and technology to craft these very believable and convincing stories, and people really do believe they’re talking to a grandchild or a government official,” Saeger said.
While phone scams are not new, technological advances — specifically in artificial intelligence and number blockers — have opened a new playing field for fraudsters who pray on unsuspecting victims to steal their hard-earned money.
“They call, and when you answer, and it’s a scammer, there’s silence,” Saeger explained.
“They want you to say ‘hello’ or ‘is anybody there?’ All they need is three seconds of your voice to input it into AI and to clone it.”
The detective also said scammers will go through “video posts” on social media as a way for them to capture voices and clone them to use to defraud others.
These scams are mostly done by Indians, and it is completely insane that the US government will not sanction them for this – even whilst they are willing to sanction Africans for not having enough gay sex with underage boys.
You really, really should not trust audio clips anymore
Even a couple months ago, it used to take a commercial service to clone a voice. No more. Here is me creating a voice clone of myself using just a 10 second reference clip on my home computer
This is all real time, no cuts pic.twitter.com/0OlBcMcYbm
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) October 14, 2024
But this is of course bigger than Indian scams. This is rapidly becoming Black Mirror. No one is going to have any idea what is real anymore.
This collapse of reality has long been predicted in science fiction. Philip K. Dick, who was my favorite fiction author when I was a teenager, is perhaps most infamous for this, but I’ve recently been going back through Frank Herbert’s non-Dune books, and Destination: Void and the trilogy that follows it, the Pandora Sequence, deals with these themes in a slightly more organized manner. Both of these writers were German-Irish, but Dick was on too many drugs and totally paranoid.
Though Philip K. Dick was satirical, many of the stories were near-future, and thus sort of almost resembling what is happening now. Herbert did primarily far-future material, where the themes are more allegorical than literal. But a technologically-driven collapse of man’s ability to get a grip on reality is a key theme in their stories as well as many other science fiction stories.
The 2009 film Pandorum doesn’t credit Herbert, but is basically a rip-off of his stories. It’s turned into a horror film, so much of the analogy is lost. It’s still a pretty good movie though.
Cryptography can be used to ensure that the person you’re talking to on the phone is really that person – unless someone gets ahold of their device and uses it to call you. That is much less of a problem than the fact that you cannot believe anything you see in a video is actually real.
More seriously, AI could be used to target you personally and manipulate your internet use in order to give you various false beliefs about the nature of reality. The internet, which we all rely on so much, could be turned into a Skinner box.
If you don’t already know what a Skinner box is, you’re going to need to read the Wiki to understand my meaning here.
Facebook was infamously caught using algorithms to manipulate people’s emotions long before the modern LLM type of AI was created.
This was 2014.
Manipulating your emotions is part of the process, but they could now very easily use Facebook and Google, as well as the AI programs people are using directly now, to manipulate your entire perception of reality.
I have often described my experience with the “Alt Right” as being like the Truman Show, as I eventually realized that all of the major figures in it were working with the feds. It was truly surreal and not something that anyone who hasn’t been in such a situation could ever understand.
But you might understand it soon.
Everyone could end up in that kind of situation, where they are the center of a vast manipulation of their reality, and they have no ability to distinguish what is real.
Probably, it’s time to start meeting with the people you know and care about in real life, and distancing yourself from technology.
